The new Skype app is always on. It’s ready to receive a call or message at any time, and it does this without running code in the background and running your battery.

Office docs on the phone can be saved to SkyDrive, and it’ll be available on your PC as well.

SkyDrive. Offers more free storage than the competitors — 7GB of total space available for free.

Rooms is a place where all of your friends and family can go to have a private space to talk to each other.

Data Sense. It compresses web pages as you browse. It understands when you are connected to Wi-Fi, and also helps find Wi-Fi hotspots on a map. When you get close to your limit, it can automatically adjust your data usage (by doing things like not updating it in the background) to help keep you from going over.

Kids Corner. A kid-blocking feature which can run certain apps but don’t allow full access.

“Today, we’re bringing phones into the Windows family with WP8,” summarized Steve Balmer. “Four years ago we really started on what became Windows Phone. We had a very different perspective on what a smartphone should be. We didn’t want to just build a phone for all of us, we wanted to build one for each of us. Different shapes, sizes and colors to make them personal for each of us.”